I have been cooking in the kitchen for more than 50 years.
When I was a child my mother always was a big influence on me learning how to cook.
To this day I am so glad she instilled this in me as a youth.
When she passed away I took on more cooking responsibilities in our family and as you can see by my extended waistline, my cooking is quite good.
Now as a seasoned, veteran cooker, I thought I have seen everything in the kitchen. Until Thursday morning I got the shock of my life.
Wednesday evening my wife Jayne and I went to Le Center to visit her father. After spending some time outside on the patio, we decided to go out for supper at The Little Dandy!!! Love that place and once again we were not disappointed.
We did, however, come within about 15 fries on finishing the entire plate of the tasty potatoes. I shared Jayne’s fries but after finishing my meal and helping her with the mound of fries, I could not eat no mo!!
So once we had our fill Jayne and I were thinking about what we would do for lunch and supper Thursday. With a cross country meet, volleyball match, and Hot Summer Nights sitting on my schedule, I figured I would throw something in the oven, cook it overnight, and then put together a few Tupperware containers filled for the two of us for Thursday day and possibly after the roll-in.
I put a whole chicken with some whole potatoes in the oven at approximately 1:30 a.m. at 220 degrees.
This should work out great. The bird would be finished by 5 a.m. and I can get those dinner meals ready.
Unfortunately, my wife forgot to take the chicken out of the oven as she left for work at 5:45 a.m. I got up shortly thereafter to see if she took any of the oven-cooked food and she did not.
I took the chicken out and checked to see if it was done. It was perfect. So after picking a few pieces off, I let the bird sit and cool down before deboning it.
Around 6:30 a.m. I went back into the kitchen and started the de-boning process. It didn’t take much because the bird was cooked so well.
As I emptied the glass dish I cooked the chicken and potatoes in, there was a pretty good amount of juice left so I strained it and and decided to make some gravy. Everyone loves gravy!!! Especially this big fella.
This time I decided just to use a few gravy packets instead of doing it myself. So I mixed the packets into the juice and started to heat the glass container on top of the stove.
Well, this was my first mistake. I had done this before, and things had always worked out well. Not this time.
I started the process and apparently I had the stove temperature too high. I went into the bathroom and came back a couple of minutes later and the gravy was bubbling pretty good.
I started feverishly whisking the gravy so it wouldn’t burn to the bottom. I was also in the process of adding some flour just to thicken it up a bit.
But I was too late. The pan had another idea as to how this gravy would end.
I shut off the stove and took the pan off the burner. I continued to stir but the damage had been done.
After taking a few quick stirs the entire glass pan exploded. I mean exploded!!! Glass, gravy, and tears from my eyes were everywhere.
Never had I blown up a glass pan in my life. I guess I could have taken that extra 15 seconds and transferred the drippings into a regular pan and made the gravy that way. I was just trying to save a step. Never again.
As I looked at the mess on the stove, floor, refrigerator, and myself, I shed a couple tears. That quite possibly could have been the best gravy I had ever made and now I will never know.
Twenty minutes later I had myself and the majority of the kitchen cleaned up. There were still shards of glass clinging to anything it could in the kitchen. The cleaning will continue this afternoon after everything cools down and I can properly assess the damage. The stove made it through unscathed!!
Lesson learned. Transfer drippings from glass to a proper pot when making gravy. Glass containers are not made to boil things in. Never would have thunk it in my lifetime that this would have happened.